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The Network State in one sentence, one paragraph, and one page
- jrm4 5y agoA few posts ago, I mentioned how I'm not a fan of Learning Management Systems, because they try way too hard to shoehorn together a bunch of things into a cohesive whole, and as a result pretty much everything suffers. By extension....yikes. I'm sure there are aspects of this that we will see in the future, but trying to do this "top down" is laughable.
- frazbin 5y agoStep 1: throw away modern western democracies, those are obviously going away. Step 2: look, now we're so screwed almost anything looks better! Step 3: crypto profit. Luckily modern western democracies aren't so easily thrown away IRL as in an essay.
- pphysch 5y agoIf you have a "clear leader", that is, a trusted authority, why do you need a Bitcoin-esque cryptocurrency and other anarchic blockchain/DeFi/"Web3" technology? Just use a central database, man. Cut out the tremendously wasteful PoX nonsense. The President could even be the DBA-in-Chief. Some of these ideas of 21st century techno-nationalism are great, but falls short when trying to shoehorn $techfad into it.
- ben-ray 5y agoNetwork states can fire their ‘clear leader,’ which is not true for all democracies. Centralizing the database introduces key trust vulnerabilities that can be eliminated in a decentralized trust-less system.
- pphysch 5y agoNo, "trust" cannot be eliminated. You can smear it around, like pretending that 51% attacks are impossible, or pretend that no one will ever put fraudulent data on the blockchain. Frankly, it's less trouble to trust a transparent central authority that can be held accountable rather than trust 100% of the population to always obey the rules.
- errantspark 5y agoThis is the fundamental truth that creates the isomorphism between cash and crypto, something a younger me didn't understand. Fundamentally there is no hard "truth" in a crypto system anymore than there is one in a fiat system. At the end of the day it's just one particular reification of a useful societal construct. Or to put it more succinctly: We live in a society.
- derekjdanserl 5y agoThat, and war is not only a real-life phenomenon but states are are nothing if not monopolies on violence relative only to empires. Competing with either is going to require either overtaking it or cooperating with it. The common case is both at the same time, i.e. a terrible plan that has failed before it began. And mere cooperation is not competition at all.
- rtkwe 5y agoYeah when you just have the blockchain tracking just itself like bitcoin it's pretty easy because the additions and movements are all internal to the system so you don't have to verify and trust an external authority. When it needs to start tracking things in the real world though it doesn't work nearly as well because you have to trust the person adding things to the blockchain isn't lying etc.
- gfodor 5y agoThe person you are replying to said there are key vulnerabilities that can be eliminated via decentralization, which is true, not that all vulnerabilities can be eliminated, which is self evident.
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- SavantIdiot 5y agoEvery generation has their utopians, from the Pythagorean's vegan communes, to the US hippies in the 1970's. The only time massive change has happened relatively overnight has been revolution with enormous, unified support of an impoverished population, see: France. This is the latest incarnation of the the 1970's SF hippy commune ideology. In that it makes broad sweeping claims without many citations or substance beyond oversimplified truisms. I expect to see "BioSphereX-Now with more crypto!" any day now, except without Steve Bannon (yes, he was actually involved in BioSphere 2 in the 80's).
- oh_sigh 5y agoI looked up the Bannon connection you mentioned, and ran across another fun Bannon fact: He gets paid every time Seinfeld airs. His investment firm helped sell Castle Rock Entertainment to TBS back in the 90s, and as part of that deal he waived part of his advisory fees in lieu of partial royalties to some current TV shows, one of which was Seinfeld.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoWow. I mean, I have plenty of words for that man, most are awful, but unfortunately, "savvy" has to be one of them. Can't underestimate that guy's giant brain even if he does want to destroy the planet.
- jl6 5y agoIn what sense are they describing a state, rather than a club (or corporation or society or whatever)? States acquire sovereignty through military violence.
- nice_byte 5y agoyup. boggles my mind how one person can simultaneously understand that the aggression trumps non-aggression AND put their faith into "crypto-civizilation". any cryptography, regardless of how advanced it is, is utterly powerless in the face of simple techniques like thermorectal cryptoanalysis :-)
- sva_ 5y agoWhat about Iceland? They have no military as far as I know. But yeah, the article seems very far "out there".
- a0zU 5y agoYeah but they still have a police force.
- gfodor 5y agoIt’s probably not a good idea to lean into definitions for your mental model of what a network state is/will be. At various stages of growth it will have similarities to clubs, organizations, societies, communities, nation states, and other things that exist today. But ultimately they will be distinct societal constructs that have technological pre-requisites that render them incoherent without them. The analog to a typical nation state is not fully knowable today imo, but ultimately it will probably boil down to having no impedance mismatch in participating in global affairs (eg treaties, UN membership, etc) vs small independent nation states.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y agoWhy call it a state if it is indistinguishable from a community or club? What sets states apart is their claim of sovereignty: their own currency, their own diplomacy, their own military, their own legal mechanisms, and their own land: - A state without its own currency is a protectorate of some larger, currency-minting state. The network state passes this test, but it is left as a protectorate of whoever has enough compute to apply a 50% attack. - A state without diplomacy is a rogue state. Crucially, it requires enough diplomatic leverage to establish itself as a legally distinct entity. - A state without military is a protectorate of neighboring powers, and thus not sovereign. - A state without legal mechanisms will not even survive as a community. - A state without land is a government in exile. Historically these don't last very long, and only survive as protectorates of a larger patron state.
- xg15 5y ago...aaand feudalism, here we are again...
- nice_byte 5y agoanything written by balajis can be safely ignored. guy's a loon.
- Traster 5y agoI think this suffers from the same problem that most technology based proposals suffer from: it reinvents something that already exist. >First, form a social network around a clear leader, a proven centralized mechanism for dispute resolution in a decentralized world. Yay! Monarchy! >Since anyone can found a network state, just like anyone can found a tech company or cryptocurrency, the legitimacy of this leader comes from whether people have opted in to follow them. And if you don't like it, go off an invent facebook yourself! If you're tech-literate surely you understand network effects and first mover advantage. Hell, why are you even centralizing at all, if the whole thing is centered around a decentralized blockchain? Why not decentralize adjudication (oh shit, I invented trial by a jury of your piers). I really wish people would focus on exploiting what technology does well, rather than focusing on re-implementing what we've already done, but worse. Local governance isn't great, but I suspect no one involved in this understands anything about the problems, hence why they spend no time thinking about how to solve them.
- gfodor 5y ago> Yay! Monarchy! Network states will only be like monarchy if you assume everyone will be a member of a single one and that it is impossible to leave the one you are a member of. Which is to say it will be nothing like monarchy: people will be members of many of them (with varying degrees of depth) and joining and leaving will be fully at-will. I'm not sure if analogies are useful here, probably not.
- jayd16 5y agoHmm, we're all parts of online communities with some owner. Being a part of many of them doesn't quite mitigate the downsides you expect from a monarchy.
- dsr_ 5y agoPshaw. It takes less than 30 seconds to conceptualize a network-state-cult that demands loyalty in the form of keeping all your material wealth in their cryptocurrency, which curiously is more convertible from other currencies and less convertible to them, unless you have special status within the state-cult. Humans love to be tribal, and right wing authoritarian followers love to prove their loyalty and defend the group against all accusations.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoExpropriation should be foremost in the mind of anyone who wants to invest in such a state. It would be easy enough for any state, particularly an unproductive one, to let you play with some land to start. It would be much harder, once it's successful, to keep them from redistributing it to the elites (or conceivably even the masses).
- drivingmenuts 5y agoI can tell you why it won’t work in one word: China. China wants centralized control and will use any means to achieve that in the long term. Even if you somehow bypass Western Democracies, China will always be lurking, ready to use physical means. The only thing keeping them in check, at the moment, is the threat of military force that they haven’t found a way around. Yet.
- motohagiography 5y agoWhen you look at how fraternal organizations with chapters are organized, from masons to motorcycle clubs, in aggregate they are pretty much the same. You could easily extend it to include the parish model of churches. A federation of small, rules and competence based hierarchies, who recognize one another and their implementation of the rules in a process called "concordance." They're distinct from the affinity and cell structure of movements because they have charters, rules, and consistency. It's not unlike a franchise model, or the hybrid franchise/state model in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, which featured Greater Hong Kong as a franchise model. What sounds different in this is these "new" network states are electronic. If you have control of any resource though, one could trivially create their own crypto token so that to buy the resource, you have to buy the token to transact in it. It's really just like buying a call option on the underlying commodity. A cartel could conceivably launch a narcodollar where the only way to buy narcotics would be by using it, and you would buy narcodollars with other currencies. The relationship between the demand for the tokens and the availability of the underlying would float. Anyone selling narcotics for anything other than narcodollars would be embargoed and sanctioned by a cartel, etc. Might be interesting if the same could be done with a variation of agile story points in an organization, or even transferrable between FOSS projects to make determinations of what developer/user preferences for the tool is, with the underlying tokenized resource being contributor time. Someone may want to buy some clout with a FOSS project, and might bid for their story tokens in another currency. A contract on whether a given patch had a vulnerability in it could use the tokens as a bounty for a lockup period for anyone who wanted to win it, etc. While I'm not quite sure, I think this is what DAO's were supposed to be, and the catastrophic failure mode of crypto has a kind of Hindenburg effect, where all anybody knows about airships is their failure mode is an inferno plumeting from the sky. Perhaps I'm missing what's distinct and net new about this Network State, but I suspect its success will depend on the resource it can tokenize.
- gfodor 5y agoI think your analysis is largely correct. Fundamentally, the idea of a network state is a relatively inductive synthesis of the plausible emergent dynamics of several new technologies. Specifically, crypto and VR/AR seem to be important pillars given the degree they will allow you to "shim" and inductively hill climb many of the moving parts of a country-scale society before the country needs to go physical. (For example, a fully modelled 3D world citizens are already de facto living in, as well as a robust, well developed economy among them and external trade partners.) It's really hard (for me) to predict what the terminal stable state looks like. Trying to predict for example just the current tokenization going on in crypto at the time of the Bitcoin genesis block would have been extremely difficult. (Not to mention DeFi and other downstream financial implications.)
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- javajosh 5y agoIs there any value in commenting on this, even to critique it? If you take it seriously, then you don't write a book about it you DO it (then maybe write a book). But this reads exactly like what a junior programmer would write about their ideal framework or language - it's entirely speculative, and so, worthless. (Of course, maybe the authors want to nerd snipe before they try it out, in which case I'd ask: what does cryptocurrency have to do with anything? Crypto is uncomfortable baggage that mediates (poorly) between the finances of a group embedded in a larger group. Also, how does this differ from starting a club, incorporating as a non-profit, start voting as a bloc to gain leverage, and THEN do...whatever the next step is? Long history of utopian communities attempting it, and you need to differentiate. The first choice is always going to be modifying your host to suite your needs, rather than attempt to reproduce everything. Again, the parallel with jr. dev thinking - "rewrite everything based on speculative benefit of one thing" is not a successful strategy IRL.)
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- gfodor 5y agoSatoshi shipped and published simultaneously.
- jimkleiber 5y agoThe main question I'm asking is what happens when the laws of the networked state conflict with the laws of the geographic state in which those citizens are located? If the networked state says its citizens can build their buildings in X way but the surrounding geographic state says to build them in Y way, what happens? Or on drugs, violence, policing, or really any law?
- alexvoda 5y agoThis article seems to be misunderstanding what the roles of a state are.